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With Ars sending writers around the globe to visit GE research centers, we wanted our readers to share in with some of the experiences we're having during these travels. These blog posts are meant to convey some highlights, rather than being an exhaustive account of our trip.

I'm doing one of the biggest trips of my life using a four-year-old cell phone and a discontinued laptop that I hate. There's a technology angle to traveling these days, and going to Shanghai has really complicated that situation.

The problem that most people face when traveling to China is its Great Firewall, which blocks access to many services that most of us take for granted. In my case, layered on top of that is the fact that the Chinese government has been accused of hacking some media organizations. Since I'm aware of that and have access to a security expert (our own Dan Goodin), I asked for his advice before setting out on this trip.

The Great Firewall wasn't so much of a problem. Any VPN software that could connect to servers on the outside would restore access to blocked sites and services.

Security, however, was a substantially larger hassle. The advice boiled down to two things: don't connect to any accounts you plan on using after the trip, and don't plan on continuing to use any hardware that you've used on public networks in China.

The first just required some careful planning. Exchange and Gmail could be set up to forward any incoming e-mail to a temporary account I could set up, and I'd just go without things like Twitter for a week. Not a big deal.

Having disposable hardware was a bigger problem. As it turned out, I was right near the end of my two-year contract period on my current phone, which I got unlocked without any trouble. That meant my current phone could be used on overseas trip, and the even-older phone I had been keeping for use overseas could become my China phone.

A window to insanity

Further Reading

As for a laptop, I got in touch with review specialist Andrew Cunningham, asking if he had anything on hand. A few years ago, Sony sent him a review unit shortly before exiting the computer business entirely. The company didn't want it back, and he had it lying around since. Perfect, right? There was only one downside—it was a hybrid tablet/laptop made for Windows 8.

While many Ars staffers would disagree, I hate Windows 8. As an interface, I find it terrible. It offers a horrible set of compromises, all for the sake of accomplishing something unnecessary: having a single OS handle tablet and laptop use cases.

Further Reading

In this case, it was made worse by Sony's hardware. The keyboard portion of the tablet has textured plastic where the touchpad and mouse button should be, as if the company is trying to taunt you about their absence. Plus the keyboard sporadically skips keypresses. And the touchscreen on this model is sensitive to the gunk your fingers leave behind on it, resulting in sporadic bouts where it registers a bunch of screen touches in seemingly random locations.

Andrew helpfully disabled the touchscreen entirely to avoid this issue. But I'm not familiar enough with Windows to run it entirely from the keyboard. So I decided to re-enable it—which was, of course, one of the things I didn't know how to do using just the keyboard.

After a couple of hours of newbie-level struggles, I had a working laptop-like device, complete with VPN software for a highly rated free service. I logged in to the Gmail account I set up and figured I was all set.

Finally up and running

Things went well when I first arrived in China. Just outside of passport control, there was a counter set up by a carrier that offered pay-as-you-go SIMs for travelers. I had one in my phone before everyone's bags had made it onto the carousel. And there were no problems getting both my phone and laptop onto the hotel Wi-Fi.

But Google wisely decided that logging in to this account from Shanghai was unusual and required me to approve it. And the Great Firewall naturally blocked the particular Google service required for said approval. This was an obvious job for the VPN, which I started up... only to see it fail to establish a connection, despite repeated tries. Trips to other popular free VPN services quickly demonstrated that links to download software were blocked by the firewall. I was stuck.

After some thought, I decided this might be a case where a paid service could actually pay off. Some company called ExpressVPN was paying Google a lot to have its name show up for nearly every VPN-related search. After convincing myself that it wasn't a scam and using its online tech support to confirm that it could be downloaded from within China, I signed up. A short time later, I was connected to Gmail. Roadblock cleared.

For whatever reason, my phone could receive e-mail, but it refused to send any. Since the same company offered VPN service for iPhones, I figured I'd get a copy of the software. Of course, downloading this software requires having an iTunes account, which I hadn't set up. And as it turns out, you need to be connecting from within the country that your account address is in. Which seemed like a job the VPN software itself could solve, except that it was only effective at establishing local connections (Hong Kong and Singapore); connections to the US kept failing.

So iTunes defaulted to deciding I was in Singapore and wouldn't let me change the country. Eventually, I figured out that you have to give it a dummy Singapore address and then go back to change it to a US one. With that, I could download software.

In the end, I could send and receive texts and e-mails with the rest of the team accompanying me in China. I could do anything I needed to do on my laptop and most of what I would want to do on my phone. I could access all the Google services I wanted, and I probably could do things like Twitter and Instagram if I felt the need. It all just took a bit more work than it probably should.

Now, if there were only some way to stop the laptop's spasms of phantom touches, I'd be set.

Promoted Comments

I lived in China for several years and I think there's an element to add to this story: what it's like to try to circumvent the firewall over time (regardless of the technology or security, or the reason - none of which I'm qualified to comment on).

While it's true that you can work around the firewall, as you spend months and years in China it becomes increasingly tiresome. Addresses failing to resolve, terribly slow speeds, VPNs suddenly blocked ... it's just a big headache. Couple this with my personal broadband experience - slow and unreliable - and by the time I moved to Hong Kong I was ready for a better internet experience.

For people trying to use global platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, it does really reduce your effectiveness.

This of course is not the case for services that are allowed, and especially services that are hosted, in China. And to me this is the point of the firewall: it gives the government just enough control, and makes global services just painful enough to use, that most people, most of the time, won't bother.

Certainly all of the white-collar workers I knew in China could easily circumvent the firewall, but they rarely did. Rather, they used Chinese services where necessary.

In any case, going back to my original point, working around the firewall is not hard. But over time, it becomes very irritating.